Orcs Must Die: A Preview

As I sit here writing this, I can hear them. Pounding on the door, splintering it, making it shudder and crack with each strike against the one thing holding them back. I am afraid, but that does not stop me; I am also prepared. I have set traps. I have my sword and my crossbow. I can do this. The door receives a final strike. It is down; they are coming now. The spikes are set. The catapults are set to launch. The blades have all been sharpened. I am ready.

Of course, none of this is actually happening. What are you, gullible? I’m setting a scene here. This is from the game Orcs Must Die. You know, the thing I’m supposed to talk about? Its about setting traps. Lots of traps. Lots of strategically placed traps. Also, orcs. Lots and lots of orcs. But let us talk for a moment about how exactly you kill all these orcs, for it is not just the simple matter of putting your sword through their skulls. No, in Orcs Must Die you must be a bit more clever than that if you want to keep your body parts all attached to each other.

In Orcs Must Die you get money. You spend money on traps. What are these traps? Things like spikes that pop out of the floor and springs that throw orcs into convenient lava pits or chainsaws that come out of the wall. Things like that. The better traps, of course, cost more money. When you’ve laid out all your traps, you say okay and press a button and the orcs come charging in. Hope you’ve set your traps well, because if some orcs manage to get through the traps you have to fight them off with your sword and crossbow.

To be honest, it’s not really that hard to kill things that get through your traps, so long as you’ve weeded out most of them beforehand. In the levels I played it was a simple matter of setting up spike traps and letting orcs walk into them. Spikes missed? Catapult time. But maybe I’m just that awesome at the game. I had a really easy time getting rid of all these guys. I only started to have difficulty when they threw in multiple giant orcs. Those things have a lot of health and your traps alone will not kill them. When you have three of them at once coming at you, this is a problem. They are going to make it very far into the level before you get rid of them all.

Now their goal isn’t really to kill you. The orcs are trying to get to the other side of the level. You’re just the pain in the ass in their path. So this does help as you’re not really in danger from them unless you wade knee deep into them. Not that there should be a knee deep if you’ve placed your traps correctly, of course. And if you didn’t, not to worry. You can just replace your traps between waves or sell them back to the store to get a different one.

Orcs Must Die is super fun. Setting traps, watching orcs step into those traps, it’s all a great time. I went into this thing not really knowing what this game was. I came out of it really looking forward to its summer release for PC, Xbox Live and Playstation Network. You should be too. It’s like playing Home Alone as a video game. Only with orcs. Not Joe Pesci. Though really, when one thinks about it, it’s really the same thing.